When renowned film director Péter Gárdos wrote the story, he intended it as a film script, but eventually he made it into a novel. “Fever at Dawn,” the love story of two Holocaust survivors―the author’s parents―has ever since sold in more than 20 territories.

Oravecz records the history of the disintegration of rural culture as though he was retelling the myth of Atlantis. The Ditch of Ondrok is a three-generation story taking place in a Hungarian village, spanning from a grandfather who had fought in the liberation war of 1848 to a grandson who had emigrated to America just before the turn of the century.

"What makes one a writer? Probably it is not being locked up, because then we would be chock full of writers, but undoubtedly, for someone who does not want to be a writer but ends up becoming one, like me, such an event can prove crucial."

"'You’re like a god,' Lajos Herda patted him on the back, then began explaining that there are these rocks on the belt, the way there are people on the earth, and Géza sits above it, the way God sits in heaven, and that, as a matter of fact, he, Géza, is the god of the rocks."

I was travelling with my then four-year-old daughter Sally on the No. 2
tram running along the Pest bank of the Danube opposite Gellért Hill.
Sally posed the question: “Why is that tall lady throwing the little
fish into the water?”